New EP News!

It feels like a combination Deja-Vu, sprinkled with a bit of the movie Groundhog Day. Back in the studio!

I’ve been meaning to use this blog space to give updates on the progress of our 2nd EP, Our follow up to “Loosing Daylight”. Alas, I got caught up in a few things, but as you will read, they’re pretty darn good excuses.

Last Wednesday (11/23/2011) afternoon we headed over to the studio. Thankfully our employers let us out early, so we were able to set up the drums, microphones, and give everything a run through. It’s nice to not have to load into a studio the day of recording, set up, and get to tracking. It’s nice when you can get in the next day, with an evening’s rest behind you. After everything was all set up, we retired to the phoenix landing for some grub, beer, and the Bruins.

Thursday was Thanksgiving. And like most of America, I stuffed my gullet with shamelessness.

Friday morning, Rob, Tia & myself rolled in at 10:00 and began tracking. Tia really put the pedal to the metal on this one. Having an EP and 8 months of practices and shows under her belt really showed. By the 2:00 we called it, with 4 of the 5 songs tracked with great drum takes. Why such a short session you might ask? The rehearsal dinner for my sisters wedding. But it’s nice to not over do it the first day.

Saturday, we went in, and Tia wanted to re-cut one of the tracks she did the previous day. I didn’t mind as we were, in my opinion, ahead of the game. Worst comes to worst, it’s a good warm up for the last song, and we have other versions to fall back on. The remaining song went down easily as well. Jen came in to do her bass tracks, as I was leaving to go to my sister’s wedding.

Sunday, I got the skinny from Rob on how things went down in my absence. Jen's bass parts were complete, and sounded fantastic! Now it was up to us to record rhythm guitars. Setting up Rob’s Hot Rod Deluxe was simple, and RE-320, and an SM57 on the speaker, with 2 condenser mic’s placed high up in the back of the amp gave us many tonal options, as well as a direct input. We used our respective pedalboards. My guitar of choice was my PRS Mira Maple top, While Rob used his Ibanez for a majority of the tracks, saving his SG for one of the more aggressive songs.

Using the same amp for the recording process is very interesting. We both have a similar amp, but his just sounds better, and it saves time in setups. We tend to get a bigger sound that way as well as being more consistent. I think it makes mixing easier too.

After 8 hours of going at it, we called it a day, with at least 2 take of each song, we were pretty busy. All but one of the songs got done, but what we did get done, started off the recording nicely.

Our goal is to have this new EP completed a lot quicker than the last one, but this time we’re already ahead of that, last time we were without a bass player.

This weekend we’re planning on getting the last of the rhythm tracks down, moving on to guitar solos within the next week or so!

Anyway that’s the way it stands now, we’ll keep you all posted